at the elbow

at the elbow

1. (archaic, idiomatic, usually followed by "of") Very near; close at hand.
   • 1886 May 1 – July 31, Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped, being Memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the Year 1751: […], London; Paris: Cassell & Company, published 1886, →OCLC:

     I was half out of bed, and Duncan had been hanging at the elbow of these fighting cocks, ready to intervene upon the least occasion

   • 1904–1906, Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.; London: Harper & Brothers, published October 1906, →OCLC:

     Many times in my life, standing in long sea-boots and streaming oilskins at the elbow of my commander on the poop of a homeward-bound ship making for the Channel, and gazing ahead into the gray and tormented waste, I have heard a weary sigh shape itself into a studiously casual comment

   • 1860 January – 1861 April, Anthony Trollope, Framley Parsonage. […], volume (please specify |volume=I to III), London: Smith, Elder and Co., […], published April 1861, →OCLC:

     She had been brought up at the elbow of this country practitioner; she had lived with him as though she had been his daughter; she had been for years the ministering angel of his household; and, till her heart had opened to the natural love of womanhood, all her closest sympathies had been with him.

• “elbow”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.